How to Personalize a Digital Experience for a Global Audience: Advice From a Manufacturer

You can configure, buy, and maintain your very own manufacturing robot with a little help from KUKA. Leaders at KUKA decided it was time to create a digital experience that better matched the wow-factor of its robots. Now, customers and integrators can do much more, much faster. Like what? Like request a specific used robot with ease, get answers and find parts all thanks to the experience-building efforts of the KUKA team. 

No one wants to conduct commerce over email

Best known for supplying robots to leading automakers, KUKA makes intelligent automation solutions for a number of industries, including manufacturing and logistics. Until recently, the way KUKA engaged with system integrators and customers was often a time-consuming back and forth over email or telephone. Whenever the KUKA marketing team created valuable content, they could only distribute it via email or post online on KUKA’s global website – and its intended audience sometimes missed it. And salespeople had to invest additional time searching for and sending this same content to their customers manually. 

KUKA decided to connect stakeholders to the company’s robotics expertise through a personalized digital experience. The idea was to provide a way for customers, partners, and employees to log in to authenticate themselves. In return, the experience would deliver content along with instant access to product and support information. 

“We had a vision for the new experience,” says Tobias Thiel, Lead Salesforce Architect at KUKA. “People would log in and find content suited to their needs. Marketers and others who create content would go faster without having to rely on IT. We wanted everything to be simple for audiences, and the people working with the content.” 

Turning to CRM data to drive personalization

The KUKA team decided that taking advantage of CRM data could be the fastest path to content personalization. KUKA opted to use Salesforce CMS along with Community Cloud, eliminating the expense of time-consuming custom integrations of additional technologies.

They built their new authenticated experience and integrated the overall look and feel of its public website – right down to the custom navigation. They imported custom style sheets from their website and implemented some light Javascript to ensure a consistent customer experience across both channels. The team connected the experience to CRM, enabling the personalization of each page and content served. 

Intelligent automation gets personal

The KUKA team created the new experience to be a single destination that links customers, system integrators, and internal users to the content and services they need. But it’s not a one-size-fits-all portal. Each user’s experience is personalized. Customers see content focused on what they need to work best with KUKA’s products and the KUKA organization. Systems integrators have access to specific programs and service options that only partners can access. And employees receive additional training content and useful links to support them in their daily work.

Following company guidelines, content creators across several departments now have independent control of the information and messages that support their products, services, and value propositions. They can develop, curate, and publish content on their own. The team advances from ideation to creation to sharing quickly. This improves the overall customer experience and improves efficiency. 

“The experience is ideally suited to the web, but we have the flexibility to publish content to any other channel in the future,” says Thiel. “The business users who develop content can work without turning everything into an IT project. They like how easy it is to get content to the right people.”

People find what they need without friction 

With the new digital experience live, customers, system integrators, and employees now find the content they want faster. They receive a personalized greeting, along with a feed of fresh content targeted to them. This content might provide information about the types of new products KUKA has launched, a trial version available in their region, or a customer-specific event KUKA will be hosting. They can even shop for spare parts, browse the inventory of used robots, or request support – all in one online environment. 

“The new experience found an immediate audience, with the user base growing from nothing to more than 5,000 people with little promotion in just a few months,” explains Dirk Engelbrecht, Manager of Digital Business for KUKA. “We expect engagement to more than double in the coming year.”

He adds, “We’ve already seen some good return-on-investment metrics from our efforts. As compared to the year prior, we have 100% more online registrations, and of those, 60% were previously unknown business contacts. Revenue generated within the experience is also growing strongly year over year.” 

All CMS are not the same. There are three types of CMS: coupled, headless, and hybrid. In Salesforce CMS, KUKA chose a hybrid content management system. Read the blog post “What Is a CMS?” to learn about the differences.